Vertigo
Have you had vertigo before, or are you currently experiencing it? Have you been feeling dizzy or light headed for a while? If so, you’re an excellent candidate for functional vestibular rehabilitation by Maine’s only Chiropractic Neurology practice. As a Fellow of the American Board of Vestibular Rehabilitation, Dr. Aaron MacArthur specializes in Vertigo and Dizziness diagnosis and treatment. So, whether the vertigo/dizziness symptoms came on suddenly without a known cause and never went away, you began to experience them after head trauma, or they correlate with migraine/headache pain, we may be able to help.
Don’t fit the mold? Welcome to Chiropractic Neurology and Vestibular Rehab BPPV (Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo) is very common and easy to treat. However, what if your vertigo is caused by something different? In many cases, it is. A very common cause of vertigo that we see in our office is the result of a disconnect between our eyes where they are not moving together as they are intended to. In many of these cases we detect that there is an individual weakness in one or more of the independent muscles that control our eye movements. As a result of this weakness there is abnormal movement of the eyes when the person is looking at something, creating aberrancies in the information being sent from the eyes to the vestibular system. This eye muscle weakness is often not even noticed by the patient, however upon clinical examination the doctor will notice that one eye is elevated and the other is depressed. It will often be seen when the doctor is performing neurological eye testing on the patient, looking for functional incongruency during optokinetics (eye movements). In other words, when your eye movements are inconsistent, they send abnormal information to your brain and make you dizzy/light headed. The actually spinning during vertigo is due to fast saccadic eye movements back to mid-line due to a unilateral weakness in one side of your vestibular system (inner ear structure).
Other contributors are functional cerebellar deficits (which occur when the body attempts to adapt to problems in our vestibular system), PMRF deficits (vestibular nuclei centers that receive information from peripheral vestibular structures), Cortical FEF (frontal eye field) deficit, or imbalance between two hemispheres/halves of the brain (appropriate communication between these two halves is important for allowing visual focus/attention and suppressing nystagmus or dizziness), and cervical or neck issues which send improper information to the brain.
Common symptoms associated with Vertigo/Dizziness:
· Nausea
· Difficulty driving
· Difficulty being in places with a lot of sensory input (grocery store, walking through a parking lot, movie theater)
· Eye elevation differences (one eye is higher than the other)
· Moving your head causes symptoms
· Hearing loss
· Visual disturbance
· Migraines
· Imbalance/gait ataxia (unsteadiness when walking)
· Dizziness or light-headed when shifting from seated to standing
· A feeling that you are disconnected from your body, a sense of confusion
· Depression associated with chronic vertigo
